Wind, Then of course, a Power Outage

     Yesterday, was day of strong winds and blowing snow.  Eventually the snow petered out, but the wind kept blowing.   Because we live in a rural area with a lot of trees, when we get strong winds, that often causes a tree, somewhere along the long power line that feeds our house, to blow over onto the line, resulting in an outage.  So I wasn’t entirely surprised late yesterday afternoon when our power went off.

    Initially, our power went off, then came back on, then off, then on, in a rapid repeat.  I knew that sort of thing can play havoc on electrical equipment, so I went to our electrical box and just flipped the breaker for the whole house off.  I figured I would leave it off for about twenty minutes, hoping that by that time, things would have settled back down.

    Twenty minutes later, I flipped the house breaker back on and was surprised when nothing happened.  At first I wondered if something had happened to the breaker, but then realized that more than likely, we were experincing a power outage.

    I got my cell phone and went to the BC Hydro (our electricity provider) website to see information I could glean.  It took what seemed like forever for the website to load, because McBride just has G3 phone connectivity.   Once the site loaded, I found out that yes indeed, a tree had blown down across a power line.    The power outage had begun shortly after 4:00, and the website said a crew was on its way (they have to come from one hour away) and it was expected that our power would be back on by 6:00.

    Six o’clock came and went, but the outage continued.  By 7:00 the temperature inside out house was starting to get cold (17°C, 63°F) because our electric baseboards weren’t working, so I built a fire in the wood stove to warm things up.

    Every time we have a long outage,I become aware of just how dependent we are on the internet to pass the time.  We can use our phones, but as I mentioned, with just G3, everything takes forever to load.  Fortunately, I had a downloaded eBook on my iPad, so I was able to read about 4 chapters, while we sat in front the fire in our wood stove waiting for the power to come back on.

    Finally, at 8:00, we heard the beeps of our electrical equipment, alerting us that they again had electricity.  It is always such a treat to finally get things back to normal.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca